Indonesia’s Dire Need for Engineers Is Going Unmet

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Friday prayers at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University, outside Jakarta. Around 20 percent of the country’s six million university and postgraduate students are majoring in Islamic studies.CreditKemal Jufri for The New York Times

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Like many college students, Abdul Hamid is not thinking too much about life after graduation.

After all, Mr. Hamid, 20, is only in his sophomore year at the Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University, outside Jakarta, the Indonesian capital. He spends his days at the university’s Faculty of Islamic Theology, where he majors in comparative religious studies, and his evenings hanging out with friends and listening to music.

Pressed about his postcollege plans, Mr. Hamid shrugged and smiled. “Inshallah, teaching,” he said, using the Arabic word for “God willing.” “Most students in my field go on to teach young people at Islamic boarding schools.”

But while that may be an honorable vocation in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, more religion teachers are not what Indonesia needs, say education experts, economists and business leaders here.

They say the country has a shortage of skilled workers — in fields ranging from medical services to agriculture — and will need tens of millions more in the coming decades. It particularly needs more engineers, a problem that could thwart President Joko Widodo’s ambitious plans to upgrade Indonesia’s outdated infrastructure.

“There’s a whole range of professionals where there are problems,” said Christopher Manning, a retired economics professor at Australian National University in Canberra, who has researched Indonesia’s economy for decades. “If you talk to any multinational corporations, there are questions about managers. There are questions about engineers.”

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A class at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University. Indonesia is facing a major shortage of highly skilled workers.CreditKemal Jufri for The New York Times

Yet of Indonesia’s six million university and postgraduate students, as many as 20 percent are majoring in Islamic studies, according to the Ministry of Research, Technology and Higher Education. And those graduates often don’t find work in their chosen field.

Indonesia’s economy, which a widely publicized 2012 analysis predicted would overtake Germany’s and Britain’s by 2030, has been growing at a disappointing rate of around 5 percent in recent years, slowed mostly by declines in the price of coal and other commodities. And its work force lags behind those of high-powered Asian nations like China, India and South Korea on global competitiveness and productivity indexes.

“The problem is quality skills and productivity,” said Eko Prasetyo, president director of the Education Fund Management Institution, an arm of the Indonesian Ministry of Finance that has awarded more than 15,000 postgraduate scholarships since 2013.

“We have to produce more engineers. We have to produce more researchers,” he said. “We can’t just be an economy led by natural resources.”

After President Joko took office in 2014, his administration declared a dozen priority fields of study for state-funded scholarships, including information technology, nursing and tourism. But Mr. Joko, a socially conservative Muslim, included religious studies among those fields, even though it was already a popular choice for students.

Rajiv Biswas, Asia-Pacific chief economist for IHS Economics, which is based in London, said that producing more skilled workers, including engineers and technicians, should be “one of the key strategic priorities for the Indonesian government over the next decade.”

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Abdul Hamid, a student of comparative religious studies at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University. Most students in his field go on to teach young people at Islamic boarding schools.

CreditKemal Jufri for The New York Times

“Indonesia is estimated to have an annual shortage of around 30,000 engineering graduates per year, and this is a key hurdle to infrastructure development and the growth of the manufacturing industry,” he said. “The Indonesian government needs to give a high priority to developing educational infrastructure to address these skill shortages, including universities for science and engineering as well as technical institutes.”

The country is estimated to have 57 million skilled workers now, and would need 113 million by 2030 based on current growth rates, Mr. Biswas said.

The challenge is a daunting one. Fewer than 10 percent of Indonesia’s 250 million people have a university-level education, according to a 2015 national labor force survey conducted by the Indonesian Central Statistics Bureau. Most Indonesians who do have university degrees work as teachers, according to data from the Asian Development Bank. Just 8 percent are engineers.

Analysts say this imbalance of professional talent is hampering Mr. Joko’s government as he attempts, with great fanfare, to carry out hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of nationwide infrastructure projects, ranging from sea and airports to highways and new power plants.

One of his ambitious goals is to create an additional 35,000 megawatts of electricity supply through new coal-fired plants by 2019, a big stretch that is now in its second year. But there is apprehension among business leaders about whether the government can pull it off.

“When they enter the construction phase, they will face this shortage of engineers. The question becomes: Where do those engineers come from?” said Heru Dewanto, president director of Cirebon Power, which operates six power plants in West Java Province and is building a seventh.

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The campus of Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University. The number of college-age Indonesians who are attending universities has increased to 25 percent from 20 percent in the past decade, but analysts say that still falls far short of what is needed.CreditKemal Jufri for The New York Times

More than half of the engineering graduates produced by Indonesia go on to careers in other fields, like banking, said Mr. Heru, who is vice president of the Institution of Engineers Indonesia. “Why? Because those jobs provide better incomes,” he said.

The same is true of graduates in many areas, including Islamic studies. Ainun Na’im, secretary general of the higher education ministry, said nearly half of Islamic studies graduates ended up in occupations unrelated to religion, like communications and public relations. And Indonesian graduates in a variety of fields take unrelated jobs not because they pay more, but because they cannot find work in their chosen profession.

“This occurs when, for example, a university graduate qualifies to be an accountant but can’t find a job in that area, so rather than be unemployed they become a taxi driver,” said Emma R. Allen, a country economist for the Asian Development Bank in Jakarta.

Such “high levels of mismatch are typically associated with weak labor productivity growth and slow transition to higher-value activities throughout the economy,” Ms. Allen said.

The problems with the country’s educational system go deep. Just 43 percent of Indonesians have completed primary school, according to the government’s statistics bureau. A June study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that looked at 34 countries found that Indonesians working in Jakarta scored last in literacy, numeracy and problem solving.

The situation is improving. For instance, in 2015, 57 percent of Indonesians who finished primary school went on to continue their studies, compared with 40 percent in 2002, according to government figures. And the proportion of college-age Indonesians attending universities has risen to 25 percent from 20 percent in the past decade. But analysts say much more is needed.

“In terms of quantity, that’s a lot of achievement,” said Sutarum Wiryono, an education senior project officer at the Asian Development Bank. “But in terms of quality, it is not.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: A Dire Need for Engineers Is Going Unmet. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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